How we will keep in touch

The activity

Before the first term, agree with your teenager how you’ll keep in touch once they’ve gone, with them setting the rhythm and you keeping your side of it.

What it is for. Once a child leaves, you are more use as someone they can talk to than as someone checking in. Agreeing the rhythm before they go, and letting them set it, means neither of you has to guess what the other wants. In a study of American first-year students who had moved away from home, how often they were in touch with home was not linked to how homesick they were, so the aim is a rhythm that suits your child, whatever it is.

• The first step. Ask your teenager how they’d like to keep in touch once they’ve gone: calls, messages, video or a mix, and roughly how often. Let them suggest it first, and keep your own suggestion short.
• Agree what happens if something is wrong: that your teenager can ring you at any hour, and what you will do if you are worried and can’t reach them, such as messaging a flatmate they have named or contacting the university.

Safety. Save the university’s contact for urgent concerns about a student in your phone before term starts, and ask your teenager for the name of one flatmate or friend you could message if you couldn’t reach them.

When to get help. If you can’t reach your child and you are worried about their safety, contact the university and tell it why. If you think your child is in immediate danger, use the routes under “If you need help right now”, at the foot of every page, and give your child’s full address, with the hall and room number. If your child has hurt themselves, or talks about not wanting to be alive, stay calm, thank them if they have told you, don’t promise to keep it secret, and act that day: help them ask the surgery for an urgent appointment, and if it is closed, use the routes under “If you need help right now”, at the foot of every page. If your child is eighteen or over, help them ask their own surgery for an urgent appointment, or use the mental-health crisis route under “If you need help right now”, at the foot of every page. If your child is badly hurt, or may have taken too much of a medicine, get medical help straight away, even if they seem well. If your child tells you that someone is hurting them, stay calm, thank them for telling you, don’t promise to keep it secret, and act that day, using the routes under “If you need help right now”, at the foot of every page; if the person hurting your child lives in your home or your child’s other home, go straight to children’s social care or the police. You can always tell your child’s GP or the university what you have seen, even when they cannot tell you anything back.

The other three steps, and your part in it, are in the library.

It goes with

• When They Leave Home. For parents whose child is about to leave home, or has just gone, for university, an apprenticeship, a job or a year away.
• When They Stop Talking to You. For parents whose teenager hardly talks to them any more.

Free on this subject

• Leaving home. What to do first, what helps, and who else can help. Free to read and to print.
• Transitions. What to do first, what helps, and who else can help. Free to read and to print.